boreders

The weather seems set to make January 2010 memorable indeed. I can’t recall the last time the snow fell so deeply – though I daresay it has in the past. I have a vague recollection of deep snow in the 70s or early 80s – and trudging through it on the way to school. I know, back then, people just got on with it. You went to school waist deep in snowdrifts and gave thanks for the opportunity to test out your survival skills. These days, people stand outside the doorstep, fall over and lay siege to the Council because they didn’t grit all the pavements.

I had extended my holiday until tomorrow to give me the chance to spend a couple of days with my wife, children safely back at school. Now, I can see that isn’t going to happen. We even have a friend of the boys staying overnight rather than risk driving him home – largely because his school has already posted that it won’t be open. They started building a snow fort in the back garden, so now they’ll be able to add turrets and crenelations come the morning and set about declaring war on the neighbours.

Ah well… I shall hunker down and ward off the cold with blankets and copious hot drinks. I wonder, with a 70+ mile round trip, continued snow fall and crazy drivers on the roads whether I’ll be returning to work this week or the next?!

Yeah, I have finally managed to start the torturous process of replacing my video tapes with DVDs. Mind, I’m not talking about replacing official tapes with discs…

In my youth, I had the habit of recording almost any noteworthy comedies or films on blank tapes. I have treasured copies of ‘A Bit Of Fry & Laurie‘, ‘Magic Roundabout’ and various versions of ‘Reeves & Mortimer’. Admittedly, I didn’t always manage to get whole series – I’m watching the first series of the ‘Smell Of Reeves And Mortimer‘ and I only had the vaguest recollection of episode 3 n’ 4, because I hadn’t recorded them at the time. The delights of Greg Mitchell and Corkie, “Noel’s Addicts’ (with the freakishly naked Noel Edmonds) plus the live appearance of Mulligan and O’Hare lamenting the loss of Rose.

I’ll have to root through the rest of the blank tapes now and see what else I’ll need to replace. Mind, some items will never be replaced, most likely… like Reeves and Mortimer’s comedy turn in “The Weekenders” pilot episode ‘The Meat Festival’.

Would it be an abuse of time travel to go back to the 80s and 90s with a DVD recorder to catch the stuff I’ll never get copies of anywhere else?

I suffer from a persistent cough. Some suggest I take up smoking just to make all the coughing worthwhile. I take such comments in good humour. In fact, I have only smoked a single packet of ciggies in my life, and that was some seventeen years ago. About nine years ago I had a lung infection, which seems to have weakened my resistance. Last year I got pneumonia, which wasn’t pleasant at all!

I have been feeling a tad rough for the last couple of days with sinus pain and an upset stomach. My appetite has faded somewhat and I’m plagued by a tickle in my throat. I daresay it’s a cold to be, or some ailment without the energy to put up a proper conflict.

Last night I got a jab for flu and one for swine flu. Now, I really feel stuffed up and my shoulders feel like the worst kind of sunburn. Prickly discomfort combined with sore muscles. I realise I should have better protection now against infection, but that’s no compensation with the headache I’ve got!!

I have been getting up 5am every morning this week. I know I should be getting up at that time anyway to get in some writing, but it rarely happens. In this instance, it has been a matter of necessity rather than choice. Someone has ruined my already horrible commute.

I travel about 75 miles every time I go to work. That represents a round trip. In theory that should be 50 minutes in each direction, fair weather and sensible traffic permitting. In reality it can be as much as twice that in bad weather and heavy traffic. Last week someone thought it’d be a good idea to complete work on the Runcorn Bridge and reduce it to a single lane in each direction.

Heading out from Liverpool, four lanes of traffic get on the bridge, so last week that meant a phenomenal amount of congestion. It took me about 45 minutes to travel a few hundred yards at one point. I tried alternate routes, but each seemed to be clogged with congestion all of it’s own. I didn’t do anything less than a 90 minute return journey and in one instance it took more than 2 hours. At the end of a long day, that can be soul destroying… It isn’t as if you have a lot of beautiful scenery to lighten the experience.

This week I hope all will return to normal. Work on the Bridge has been confined to overnight activities, so now there’s just the standard traffic to contend with. I’m done grumbling for the moment…

We played a game of Power Grid yesterday for the first time. Bought the copy at a gaming event over the summer when we were looking for recommendations on a good new game. Unfortunately, gaming evenings have been few since then, so yesterday was our first chance to give it a go.

Basically, you buy power plants, acquire the rights to power cities, and then make money from supplying power with resources you purchase from the open Market. Well, something like that.

You get the power plants from an auction, so there’s increasing competition in that area to acquire the most fuel effecient options – one player got an all wind power power plant, which powers for no resources at all. The auction gets complex when you’re trying to plan ahead for city growth, while balancing against the cost of buying resources and building into cities to begin with. Do you drive to outbid someone for a more fuel efficient station or go for something dirty and resource hungry to save for greater expansion? Once you have a plant you can’t bid again and there’s nothing more frustrating than finding a more fuel efficient plant than you just bought comes up for auction next!

Once everyone finishes acquiring a plant, you then acquire resources in reverse player order (based on the number of cities you’ve built into). Rules of supply and demand dictate the value of resources – so being first matters. You can buy as much as you want, providing your plants can use the resource and you can’t store more than double the plants consumption. So, more planning – buy now or maybe pay extra later.

Building into cities comes next – in reverse order, too. I’m reasonably certain you can pick a good spot from the outset. Maybe I chose wisely or simply lucked out. Suffice to say, if you’ve planned well in the previous two phases of the round, you’ll either have the resource to build or you won’t!

In the end you get paid for each city you supply with power, expending the resources at your plants. You can choose to power less, but you make less money, which will impact your activities in the next round.

There’s more complexity to the game, but suffice to say, as a first timer, I enjoyed it and the other players did too. Recommended. A good balance of thought, skillful planning and a dash of luck.

Well, I’ve spent today at Game 09 in the middle of Manchester at the Palace Hotel. Nice enough venue, though a little thin on traders for my tastes. While the kids chose to play Magic or Warhammer 40k, I decided to do something a bit different, opting for Decipher’s Fight Klub.

Basically, take some movie heroes and villains then launch them into a pitched battle that stretches reality a bit. Imagine the Terminator fighting Hannibal Lector, for example. You might be able to explain the conflict as one of brute force against guile and intellect, but you don’t doubt in truth Arnie would reduce Hannibal to paste. You can fight with Tank Girl, Jigsaw, Ash and others, choose moves, advantages and gear from your hand, fuelled by limited energy tokens. There is undoubtedly more skill here in deck construction and play than most, but I had to borrow a deck lacking one of my own.

The problem with the game is that Fight Klub cards come in kilo packs… basically 120 cards, rules and energy counters. That will set you back $35 (inc. postage) and is the smallest retail set you can buy. No boosters here. So, playing is fine, but you need to commit to get your own play cards and will want some for an opponent. That’s an investment. Yes, you can get a reasonable play deck together for one sum, and that’s a good thing. Great decks don’t necessarily involve spending tons of cash on cards. However, the event I played in had 13 players and about half of those were existing players – and while I might be wrong, it was those who had played before (including one of the organisers) who won the prizes. I don’t think that’s an ideal way to recruit new players into a game with such a start-up hurdle.

I’m being critical here, because I think the game has potential; but learning and buying curves make it a tough sell and a tough recruitment prospect.

Update: I have taken the plunge and expect a couple of Kilo packs to the hit the doormat within a week or so. As I said, I see Fight Klub as having great potential and I want to prove it to myself and my friends. If I can make Fight Klub successful in my home, I can contribute toward the greater cause.

In addition, I have started a Fight Klub-specific blog on Tumblr called Don’t Talk. I fully intend to outline the trials and tribulations of my Fight Klub buying and playing experiences – so the public can get a sense of how it works. Decipher have taken a big risk here with a new model – and it needs a little confidence and a dose of patience to get involved.

In an ideal world, I think technology should be as flexible as possible, meeting myriad needs of the average user in a single compact package. For example, since I got a new computer a while back I have been searching for something that will allow me to blog without having to visit my blogs. I tried MarEdit and WordPress on the iPhone, and now I’m trying Flock, which is not only letting me post to my blogs, but keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter and the World Wide Web. I like that.

I have been plagued with a similar frustration for features around Twitter clients on the iPhone. Ultimately, if the app lets you tweet that should be enough, right? Nah. I’ve tried Twitfire, Tweetie, Echofan, NatsuLion, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, and Tweetie 2 – which is my current primary client. They all have something to offer, but Tweetie 2 has delivered landscape typing, which I’ve been hankering after for an age.

Now, it might not seem to fit into the bracket of technology, but I have been struggling to find a ‘pad’ for work. If I just wanted something with lined paper, I’d be fine, but that isn’t enough. I could pick up a pad from stationery if I wanted something so simplistic. I have seen Oxford notebooks that have hard covers, spiral binding, nooks for keeping loose papers in, and lined pages marked with points to allow you to draw vertical lines for improvised graphpaper, but… I’m at a loss to define exactly what it is that I’m after. I know I need something more, but I’m not entirely sure what that is. Perhaps, I’d like paper that was lined on the front and graphed on the back, with enough weight in the paper to mean I can use a marker on either side without suffering seepage. I undoubtedly would like tabbed page dividers to keep my notes in order, but I’d also quite like some kind of integrated indexing tab dispenser with those narrow colourful tabs that Post-It do. And maybe the card cover of the pad could double up as an impromptu wipeboard… Too far?

So, I find myself plagued by a need for features – might explain the number of hardly used apps on my iPhone. I hunger for functionality… and yet, I wonder whether having found my Holy Grail I won’t be left wanting for just a little bit more.

I use a fair few apps, but generally I don’t post reviews. I thought I’d start. Downloaded Red Laser – www.redlaser.com – by Ocipital, purely on a whim and because it was in the Top Apps. Yes, I’d normally be cautious of that, but it turned out well…

Basically, when you start the app, you hit a lightning button and then hold the camera over the barcode. An onscreen guide assists in getting the right spot – and when steady the app auto-scans. Once done, Red Laser searches your local Amazon and Google for the best deals.

Firstly, no gushing here. I noticed that a couple of reviewers have said they have been unsuccessful scanning anything; but, my experience has been about 85% success, about 10% scans that identify the item or manufacturer but no detail, and 5% are just wrong. It might prove less than that, as I’ve only scanned a few dozen items and suffered just one truly bad result. So, no it isn’t perfect.

I have found books, DVDs, CDs and games work best – so, I’m not sure what the negative reviewers have been trying to scan. If it’s on your localised Amazon site – you should have no problem.

However, in addition, I’ve had good results with niche food items. It would be good to have a way to search in tandem with a supermarket site; but, despite no such link, I have managed a successful scan of Kraft Vegemite, Anchor Chicken Salt (knew what it was, but no current seller), Skippy Peanut Butter, and even Free & Easy Dairy Free Cheese Flavour Sauce Mix. Yes, the app thought a Tesco’s own brand Tomato Puree was some kind of inflatable ring – but that was the only complete fail. Even where no offer existed, it got the manufacturer of other product right.

Scanning is pretty simple and I’ve had results from barcodes that looked positively unreadable. With the assistance of my Griffin Clarify case, the scanning becomes even easier on the 3G. It isn’t always instant, but more often than not that’s because my hand isn’t steady or the light is poor.

I shop a lot and comparing prices against Amazon means typing the ISBN in again and again. With this, life should be a lot easier.

I hope to see some extension of function to include other search sources; and, I’ve raised a query about Amazon outward links with the developer. Otherwise, I thoroughly recommend this app and look forward to future developments. For £1.19, I don’t feel cheated. This app will get used many times over and it’ll save my poor fingers from all those ISBNs.

I seem to have spent a good part of the weekend snagged up in the seedy world of the Internet. No, I have not been knee deep in porn or wading through pixelated orcs in a raid. I have been participating in the honourable pursuit of “working out what the heck makes something tick”.

I now seem to have spent the last month trying to move my old web presence from a hosted package to a virtual server. One of the things this has involved is a learning curve rather like K2. When you have to slog so much, you appreciate a helping hand – so, I tried loading a piece of pre-installed software to run an image gallery. Alas, the accuracy of the automated install seemed to be rather poor. I ended up with something that, at best, didn’t fail completely, but that obviously wasn’t working properly either.

So, I set about working out what needed to happen to get it working. This was akin to someone giving me a paragraph of text in a foreign language and asking me to translate, accurately, merely using reference books. At first, I spent a while going through support forums and searching for likely causes of the error, then I tried resetting permissions and re-install elements of the setup. Finally, I decided to run through the whole configuration and installation procedure from scratch. Each error that arose was cross-referenced and fixed, a painful and gradual process of trial and error.

Finally, at 9.40pm yesterday evening, I completed the re-install and the gallery worked “perfectly” (within acceptable tolerances). My weekend had vanished, but the work had been done.

I ponder, was this weekend lost in translation, or did I gain something from the experience. Perhaps, my knowledge increased just a little along the way, though probably not by much.

YouAre Theme Demo shows off a neat looking theme for the blog keyed in to self-promotion. Looks remarkably easy to customise right from the Dashboard – judging by the screenshots on the site.

I shall have to give it a spin myself sometime and see how well it handles…

On a tangent, how come when you plan to do something or go somewhere, the weather spontaneously turns to precipitous shit. I have precious few days off in the year as it is, so I would really appreciate the world giving me a break and serving up some benign meteorological conditions, damn it.